Sosei Group Corp. has only one clinical candidate in development, but the Japanese biotech may have found its R&D engine in drug discovery platform company Heptares Therapeutics Ltd. The M&A deal marks a clean break from Sosei's recent history as a reprofiling company and, according to founder, Chairman andCEO Shinichi Tamura, should make the company globally competitive as a pure play biotech developing innovative molecules against GPCR targets.

Sosei last week said it would acquire Heptares for $180 million up front and up to $220 million in milestones. Tamura said the most important asset is Heptares' StaR drug discovery technology, which stabilizes GPCRs in their functional forms, allowing for isolation and purification outside the native cell membrane.

Genentech has taken the unusual step of publishing negative safety data from its preclinical LRRK2 program, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation is pulling stakeholders together to determine the clinical implications.

THE DISTILLERY brings you this week's most essential scientific findings in therapeutics, distilled by Innovations editors from a weekly review of more than 400 papers in 41 of the highest-impact journals in the fields of biotechnology, the life sciences and chemistry. The Distillery goes beyond the abstracts to explain the commercial relevance of featured research, including licensing status and companies working in the field, where applicable.

This week in therapeutics includes important research findings on targets and compounds, grouped first by disease class and then alphabetically by indication.

This week in techniques includes findings about research tools, disease models and manufacturing processes that have the potential to enable or improve all stages of drug discovery and development.